It was still clear, but a thin, wispy scum of cirrus had spread across the upper atmosphere, and a dark line of squalls was visible just above the southwestern horizon.

Jon Krakauer -- Into the Wild

Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere.

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The Scarlet Letter

When I crossed the goal line, I felt like a jet breaking through low clouds and coming out into the blue skies of the upper atmosphere.

Carl Deuker -- Gym Candy

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He would leave an offering to whatever deity inhabited the upper atmosphere.

Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin -- Three Cups of Tea

Neither knew much about the Scoops, except that they were a series of secret capsules intended to analyze the upper atmosphere and then return.

Michael Crichton -- The Andromeda Strain

How much was carried into the upper atmosphere and has been filtering down since?

Pat Frank -- Alas, Babylon

All afternoon the plane had soared through the thin mists of the upper atmosphere, far too high to give clear sight of what lay beneath.

James Hilton -- Lost Horizon

Saphira flew at as lofty an altitude as Eragon could endure because it was easier for her to traverse long distances in the rarefied upper atmosphere than in the thick, moist air near the ground.

Christopher Paolini -- Brisingr

…calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’ clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- One Hundred Years of Solitude

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We’d be skimming the upper atmosphere, so our orbit would rapidly decay.

Andy Weir -- The Martian

The loaded capsules are heavy; they punch through the high, thin winds of the upper atmosphere without being blown too far out of position — but just the same a platoon is bound to disperse on the way down, lose some of the perfect formation in which it unloads.

Robert A. Heinlein -- Starship Troopers

Its avowed aim was the collection of any organisms that might exist in "near space," the upper atmosphere of the earth.

Michael Crichton -- The Andromeda Strain

Leavitt himself suggested the analogy of the upper atmosphere and the depths of the sea as equally inhospitable environments, but equally viable.

Michael Crichton -- The Andromeda Strain

Almost at once I felt the capsule twist and sway, then steady down so that my weight was on my back …. weight that built up quickly until I was at my full weight (0.87 gee, we had been told) for that planet as the capsule reached terminal velocity for the thin upper atmosphere.

Robert A. Heinlein -- Starship Troopers

I think we can be fairly confident that the organism will move into the upper atmosphere without causing further difficulty on the surface, so there’s no problem there.